


Disputed Territory

by GloriaMundi



Category: The Apple-Tree Throne - Premee Mohamed
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Ghosts, Gift Fic, M/M, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28130679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/pseuds/GloriaMundi
Summary: One for trouble, two for tears ...Theo is lost now that Braddock has left.
Relationships: Benjamin Braddock (The Apple-Tree Throne) / Theodore Wickersley (The Apple-Tree Throne)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Disputed Territory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merit/gifts).



**one for trouble**

The guest house is unnervingly unempty after Braddock's departure. The echo of the man's screams—he'd still been favouring that leg, his souvenir of Burantai Pass, but he'd never screamed aloud before—still rings in the quiet rooms, around and around like a glass marble in a metal bowl. Theo cannot follow him: should not follow him. "I am leaving," Braddock had said, "and you must therefore leave.” He should let Braddock go, and he himself should … be gone.

But to where?

Instead he moves around the familiar rooms. On and through the bed where Braddock had slept, trying to soak up the scent of him. At the desk where Braddock had sat. There's a pale mark from his own wrist marring the mahogany: Braddock is right-handed and spent little time writing here, not enough to leave a sign.

Theo would like to take the note that Braddock wrote and … and what? Copy it in a fair hand? Burn it to ashes? Hide it behind the wainscot? But he cannot interfere. If Braddock's accusations were to be believed, Theo has already cost him almost everything. (Everything? That's the price that Theo himself has paid, for a moment's mistake.) He cannot silence Braddock now. He must leave the misspelt, poorly-scrawled letter for his mother to find, for Rosalyn to read.

So: what now? He wants to stay, here in the house that was his: but without Braddock's steady, solid presence, he is tattering and translucent. Even when he howls in grief, now, he does not think that Mrs Boyle can hear him. He had known her most of his life, but somehow Braddock had come to be … more.

And yet he resists, without really meaning to resist, his own disintegration. This is not heaven nor is it hell—and nor is it much like life any more. And he is still distantly aware of his own monstrous rage at having been cheated of the years he might have lived. Cheated, curtailed, cut short. Cut.

**two for tears**

He'd hate Rosalyn for her entrapment of Braddock, whose upbringing had left him naked and armourless against the ways of women: but he loves her a little, too, for seeing Braddock's worth. For wanting to give him … herself, and her laughter, and the scent of her skin.

He wishes he could recall the scent of Braddock's skin. It must have been sweat, and salt, and mud: but Theo is almost certain that there was a uniqueness to it. Of course they seldom had the opportunity to inhale one another. There was a night on the ship where neither could sleep, and Theo had caught Braddock watching him— _looking_ at him, looking in a way that made Theo think of the boys he'd liked at school.

"See something you like, soldier?” he'd challenged, trying to make it a joke.

And Braddock had kept looking at him, and had said, "Yes, sir,” in a way that robbed the words of any—any deference to rank, any respect, any of that nonsense.

And there had been—hadn't there been?—a dark corner of the deck, Braddock shushing him as one of the crew went past, the calm procession of waves against the hull, the frantic mounting gasps as they laid hands on one another—

Hadn't there?

Theo panics, because he cannot be sure of that memory. He cannot be sure that the face he recalls is Braddock's at all. He has nothing of the man now, not even a tin-type. He can't imagine Braddock ever posed for one. When would he have had the opportunity? When would he have had the money to spare?

But Braddock has time. He is alive: he can go on: he can kiss and touch and love and … and …

**three for hopes**

He can barely remember what it was to hope. All his hopes are in his past, and he has lost his past as well as his future. Surely at one point he had hoped that he and Braddock …

Yes. There had been that evening in … he cannot now recall the name of the little town in Neo-Gall. His men had been riotous in the taverns and the brothels, and Theo had sat at the window of his billet and watched them indulgently.

A rap on the door. Braddock.

"What is it, Lieutenant?” He'd tried to be brusque. "Shouldn't you be out there enjoying yourself?”

"I should rather be here, sir,” Braddock had said, his stony expression barely slipping.

"Enjoying yourself?” Theo had barely been able to whisper.

"Yes, sir.” And Braddock's smile … Braddock's smile …

That was the longest they had spent alone together while Theo was alive. A few short hours of darkness with the raucous howls and songs and shouts outside drowning any sound that either of them might have made. He remembers the slide of skin against skin, the taste of Braddock's mouth (aniseed and charcoal), the odour of semen and sweat and his own pomade. He remembers them distantly, as though he had read somewhere that such sensations were experienced by the living.

He would like to fall into Braddock. Not in that gross carnal sense, which they had had neither courage nor privacy nor time enough to try, but simply to sink into Braddock's body as he finds himself sinking into beds and chairs: sink in until the limits of his incorporeal self exactly match the perimeter of Braddock's rosy skin.

He tries to imagine what his life would be like now, if he—no. If Captain Eleutherios had not elected to make an example of him. If he had not been led, shivering and starving, up onto that vulgar lapis-encrusted, brassy chariot to spill his life out for the amusement and edification of the assembled vizcasters. Would he be home by now? Would the Disputed Territory still be disputed? Would Captain Eleutherios have been captured and imprisoned, his mercenary army scattered to the round earth's imagined corners?

Let's say he would have come home, the conquering hero, feted and decorated. Rosalyn might have consented to a winter wedding, and Braddock …

Braddock would have slunk back into the slums. He would not have been invited to the wedding, or to the victory-parties, or to the memorial services: and if he had attended any of those, he would have been on the far side of an unbridgeable chasm, and Theo would never have seen him again.

**four for fears**

Theo might never see him again.

He doesn't know where Braddock might have gone. To his friend, Lieutenant Clark, perhaps? But Theo has no earthly idea of where Clark might make his home. Braddock was his compass, and now Theo does not know which way to go. Where did Braddock go, when he was not here at home? A pub somewhere, when he was hiding from Theo: the hospital, perhaps, for his leg (though hadn't he said the doctors had signed him off as fit?). Braddock had dined with the Wickersleys at Lindow House: he had gone to church with them. He had stolen—

He had stolen nothing that Theo could have kept, and he has taken nothing with him that Theo would want. Except himself.

There are waymarks in the grey world, but none that point the way to anywhere that Theo wants to be. There are other ghosts, too. The air is thick with them, a roiling of ghosts like starlings in a murmuration. Millions of them, and not one of them that he knows. It's not as though he is interested in making their acquaintance.

And none of his own dead have come to haunt him. What was it that Braddock had said? "I would have thought the others would be with you. Or perhaps they're where they died. Where you led them to death. In the Burantai Pass. Is the destination determined by volume or weight?”

So many deaths on his conscience. So many ghosts to haunt him. But not Braddock.

How different it might have been, if Braddock had been—had been someone with whom Theo could confer, when the messenger with his yellow paper arrived. If Braddock had been a field officer, or had come from a good family: if he had been Theo's equal, as Patroclus was Achilles'. Because Braddock had been a good man, and a brave one: he would have guided Theo towards the right course.

**five for a journey**

Theo is lost. The other ghosts travel those mysterious ways, busy on duties of their own: but if there are orders for him, they have gone astray. They are not coming. He understands that now. His penance, because he did not obey, is to wait. He does not know how to navigate—without his compass—the shadow country where he is deployed.

That country is colourless, and Theo can feel it leaching the colour out of his skin, his flesh, his bones. Though he supposes the worms will have taken care of what Captain Eleutherios left.

Braddock, he thinks, anchored him to the house he had called home. Now that he is gone, Theo has no home. It is easier, now, to move through the shadow-land: to drift from place to place. He does not care to haunt his parents, though his father still wears a rusty-black armband to church. He fears that his mother would look straight through him. As for Rosalyn… better that she should forget him, as he had so nearly forgotten her.

Without Braddock to leave and return to, it is hard for Theo to measure the passing of time. All days are the same, and all nights. Everything is grey, bleached, muffled, smooth. He had not realised how much of Braddock's own life he had taken: had been freely given, for all the man's protests.

He drifts. He cannot find the graves of any of his men. Perhaps they are buried in Gundisalvus' Land. Perhaps they were cremated, and decanted into those little celluloid urns, the ones that had always made Theo think of cosmetic pots on his mother's dressing-table. He drifts to Mossley, where his ancestors are buried though he was not deemed worthy: he drifts to Lindow House, where his mother is hosting another dinner-party for Rosalyn: he drifts to St Thomas's, and the cemetery where the worms are working on his bones.

And there on his grave, like a gilt-edged invitation but infinitely more sincere, is a bedraggled wreath of red and pink and white roses, laced together with ribbons that suddenly and sharply remind Theo of the colour of Braddock's eyes. He has always loved roses. He sits on his own tombstone, inhaling, trying to smell them: and senses instead the ghost of a salute.

The secret ways, the paths the other ghosts use as they go about their business, are still closed to him. But now there is a new path, blue as ribbon, and following it is as easy as the way home at the end of the day.

**six for a home**

For a moment, at the window, he baulks. This is a place for the living, and there is no bowl of blood set out, in the Greek fashion, to summon him and give him strength to speak.

He has spilt too much blood already: his own, and his men's.

"Braddock?” he says: and Braddock—Ben—looks up towards him, his eyes still reflecting the embers he'd been gazing at.

"I think that I have a place where I may rest in eternity,” Theo says: and because he is still nauseous with the memory of his own fear, "only do not send me away again.”

"Why bother? You'll just come back,” says Ben, smiling, with tears on his face.

"Endlessly,” promises Theo.

**seven …**

There are no trees here, only weeds growing tall and strong. Theo has a vague nostalgic longing for the tangled glory of the gardens at Lindow House. But already his memories of the place are fading, overlaid with this new place that already feels like home. Outside, in the thin grey drizzle, laundry is flapping on the wash-lines that are strung from house to house: and magpies are flapping there too, hopping between the dull greys and pastels of shirts and sheets, preening and cockading and bickering with one another. Theo has not seen so many magpies in one place for a long time. He begins to count them aloud, though it's difficult to keep track with the birds so merrily dancing amid the faded garments that hang dripping in the drizzle.

"Seven,” says Ben from beside him at the window. "Seven for a haunt doomed e'er to roam.” And they laugh together.

**Author's Note:**

> Myriad thanks to Claire for beta and clarity!


End file.
